Wheat is murder? WTH?

[ponderingturtle]

If your symptoms are relieved by not eating gluten, do you really need a test to confirm or deny this?

Depends on how comfortable you are with a degree of uncertainty.

 

[Oystein]

There is an elaborate debate, what is indisputable is that wheat is the most recent (major) addition to our diet and it's easy to see how this would contribute to a widespread intolerance. The debate is summarized very well here...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet#Rationale_and_evolutionary_assumptions

Uhm.
Who is implied in "our"?
If this means mainly Eurasians (and their modern descendants in the Americas and Oceania), then corn and potatoes have been added as staples much more recently - only less than 500 years ago!

 

[Joey McGee]

Uhm.
Who is implied in "our"?
If this means mainly Eurasians (and their modern descendants in the Americas and Oceania), then corn and potatoes have been added as staples much more recently - only less than 500 years ago!

"Donnie, you're out of your element!"

Ok, but I thought corn is in the same family as wheat, (and is just after wheat in on the list of common food allergies) Maybe there wasn't a big shock to the system for the Europeans because of that? Potatoes maybe had a lot in common with the root vegetables people were already eating? Yeah Seems like a stretch to me too but this is what was in my head for some reason

If you look at the top 8 food allergies, they look like evolutionarily novel, hard to process or digest stuff (milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soy, and wheat) Makes you wonder about the evolutionary hypotheses. But I've just spent an hour learning about how utterly complex allergies are and how little we know about them.

Thank God the only thing I'm allergic to is woo

 

[Mark6]

I'm Italian.

Bread. Period. Lots of it.

This whole wheat allergy thing would never happen to an Italian.

If it did, he would die right away, and there wold be no more Italians allergic to wheat.

 

[jayh]

Big Ag shill!

(Yes, I like 'Big Ag'. Sounds much better than 'Big Wheat'. And more ominous -- they sound like they control pork too.)

oh no! not Big Bacon!! tell me it ain't so!

 

[jayh]

Good!
The only reasons why wheat flour is used so much are economic ones. Aside from bread, and from choux pastry, (There is actually no such thing as gluten free bread, it's gluten free savoury cake) wheat flour is worse than the gluten free alternatives for just about everything because of the gluten.

Cake or biscuits particularly are better products when made with rice flour. I..

I think most people (including my wife who makes rice flour pastry) will disagree with you. Nothing provides the taste and texture of pastry and bread quite like glutten. Some pretty clever substitutes have been developed, but they are all second class substitutes.

We will be visiting Paris in a couple of weeks and my wife has decided that she'd rather put up with the discomfort for the week (her symptoms are not as severe as some people) than miss out on proper French bread and pastry.

 

[jayh]

This is an important point that I often make to people who give me the "we've only had 10,000 years to adapt to wheat" line.

We must have previously been eating the ancestors of today's wheat or we wouldn't have tried to cultivate it. People probably tried to cultivate plants they were familiar with and knew how to prepare first. It doesn't make sense that people would attempt to cultivate plants they had no experience with. So, it's likely people had been eating wheat for a long, long time prior to cultivation. It's just grass. We probably ate anything starchy would could get our hands on, including grass seed.

I think you're overestimating what people knew. Remember that we are omnivores, so parts of our diet came from many different sources. The determination of exactly what to cultivate probably resulted from what was easiest to cultivate rather than a nutritional analysis. This is one of the points made in Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel", that cultures were largely influenced by what plants and animals lent themselves to easy domestication. Peas for example entered our diet because of a single mutation that created a pod that did not explode as soon as the peas started to ripen, making them a potential food source.

Indeed skeletons from early agricultural sites show significantly less health than their ancestors and their descendants.

Of course this does not mean that hunter-gatherers had a good time of it either, their populations were greatly constrained by resources. The modern day Russeaus who worship the hunter gatherer lifestyle wouldn't last long if you threw them out into a non-tropical winter and told them to eat what they can find.

 

[sadhatter]

Based on the experiences of a close relative, Celiac disease is not easy to diagnose. Symptoms like diarrhea and fatigue aren't specific to it, and their onset can be gradual. All diagnostic tests require you to eat gluten for weeks or months before the tests. In other words, if you have the disease but you have by yourself found a diet that minimizes your symptoms (and I bet we've always had people among us who say that this or that does "not agree with them") , to get diagnosed you need to scratch that and stick with a diet that makes you sick for weeks.

That is not to say that people who just want to make a number out of themselves don't use imaginary food allergies for that. A friend who is a waiter at one of the better restaurants in town says that whenever there's a documentary on Celiac disease on national TV, the number of clients who make a big fuss about getting gluten-free food increases dramatically for a few days. What's more, many of these people order a regular beer with their carefully-picked gluten-free meal...

I call this "60 minutes" or " 20/20" syndrome.

We used to experience it all the time in the call center. To the point where we would get advance notice if a topic likely to cause a huge call volume and questions was going to come up.

I remember the entire "slamming" fiasco. The actual incidence of this happening was strikingly low, but we would have people with accounts 5+ years old calling in and asking " was i slammed to mci?". Or asking how they could know if they were "slammed" to a different company. Some would even go on for an hour plus, screaming about the horrors of slamming. Then ask what it was.

People get riled up in a hurry, and they don't look into it. They just remember the keywords and go off on tirades. Sometimes the word Baaaa really describes the human race.

 

[Ambrosia]

Nothing provides the taste and texture of pastry and bread quite like glutten. Some pretty clever substitutes have been developed, but they are all second class substitutes.

For bread this is absolutely true. There is no such thing as gluten free bread, it's gluten free savoury cake. Pastry is different though.

There are 2 main parts that make up flour. Starch and protein(gluten) When you get flour wet the water causes the gluten to form into long chains, these chains become more developed when you work the dough.

For bread this is ideal, so bread flour typically uses high gluten wheat, and has added gluten, more stretchy chains of gluten means more CO2 can get trapped inside it = lighter bread.

This is the last thing you want with pastry. The 'rubbing in method' thats most commonly used with pastry where you rub fat into flour until it resembles breadcrumbs, is specifically designed to waterproof and isolate the gluten molecules in the flour. You do not want them to get wet and form chains, that way lies rubbery tough pastry. This is also the reason that you should only ever roll out pastry once, the more you work the dough the more you disturb the fat coated, isolated gluten in the flour so that it gets wet and gluten chains form in the pastry.

There are exceptions. Choux pastry is a different kettle of fish entirely. For choux paste you start out boiling together fat and water then add the flour to it and beat it like mad to make what's known as a panada, to which then you slowly add beaten egg. What this does is crosslink and develop the gluten chains and traps water and air inside the mix. When it gets hot the air expands and the water evaporates. As the paste is so wet the bubbles collapse inside to form 1 large cavity and the heat oustide sets your eclair so the whole thing doesn't collapse. Gluten is essential to this process as it is for bread.

By and large though for most other pastries crosslinked gluten proteins are bad. That is why a flour that doesn't have gluten in it is superior to a flour that does for most pastry or biscuits. There are wheat free substitutes that taste very similar, they are usually at least 10 times the cost though. I really like rice flour, this might have more to do with getting raised on my grans shortbread though.